What Edwards could learn from McCain

In a perfect world young couples fall in love, marry, and remain committed to each other for a lifetime. Couples grow stronger with each year of marital bliss and face life’s hardships together with an unbreakable bond.

But then there is reality. I have to admit that I am often shocked to hear or read of problems that couples experience — problems that can destroy a marriage. Some of these couples live their marriages on a political stage with the whole world watching.

John Edwards’ admission that he was unfaithful to his wife Elizabeth struck a nerve with most American women. Married over 30 years, one wonders how he could be unfaithful to this woman who has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. This is the woman who campaigned with him for his bid for the White House.

Appearing on ABC’s “Nightline,” John Edwards told Bob Woodruff, “In 2006, two years ago, I made a very serious mistake. A mistake that I am responsible for and no one else. In 2006 I told Elizabeth about the mistake, asked her for her forgiveness, asked God for his forgiveness. And we have kept this within our family since that time.”

Edwards denies that the child born to Rielle Hunter, the woman with whom he had the affair, is his: “I know that it's not possible that this child could be mine because of the timing of events, so I know it's not possible. Happy to take a paternity test, and would love to see it happen.” The New York Times quoted a statement by Hunter’s attorney who said his client “will not participate in DNA testing or any other invasion of her or her daughter’s privacy now or in the future.”

Probably one of the most disturbing things about the affair is that Edwards lied to the American public when the National Enquirer published allegations of the affair and a photo of Edwards holding a baby. Speaking to Woodruff, Edwards said, “I don't know if the picture has been altered, manufactured, if it's a picture of me taken some other time, holding another baby — I have no idea.” Although the child probably is not his, it was time for Edwards to come clean about the affair.

This sordid mess could be political poison for Edwards and there are those who are writing him off as a political failure, but that does not have to be the case. There are those politicians who survive sex scandals and still are able to run for the highest office of the land.

Take John McCain for instance. Granted it was way back in 1979 when John McCain first met Cindy Hensley in Hawaii at a military reception. In McCain’s 2002 autobiography “Worth Fighting For,” he wrote that Cindy “was lovely, intelligent and charming, 17 years my junior but poised and confident.” He admitted by “the evening’s end, I was in love.”

There was one major problem: McCain was still married to his first wife, Carol, though McCain claimed they had separated. Carol admits in Robert Timberg’s book “John McCain: An American Odyssey” that she doesn’t blame the breakup of their marriage to McCain’s time as a prisoner of war in Vietnam or her serious auto accident: “The breakup of our marriage was not caused by my accident or Vietnam or any of those things. I don't know that it might not have happened if John had never been gone. I attribute it more to John turning 40 and wanting to be 25 again than I do to anything else.”

In a July Los Angeles Times article, Richard A. Serrano and Ralph Vartabedian state that court papers show that “McCain did not sue his wife for divorce until Feb. 19, 1980, and he wrote in his court petition that he and his wife had ‘cohabited’ until Jan. 7 of that year — or for the first nine months of his relationship with Hensley.” Another interesting fact is that “Although McCain suggested in his autobiography that months passed between his divorce and remarriage, the divorce was granted April 2, 1980, and he wed Hensley in a private ceremony five weeks later. McCain obtained an Arizona marriage license on March 6, 1980, while still legally married to his first wife.”

The Reagans, according to Serrano and Vartabedian, thought John and Carol McCain were “happily married, and they were stunned to learn otherwise, according to several close aides.” The Reagans came to Carol’s aid by “finding her a new home in Southern California with the family of Reagan aide Edwin Meese III and a series of political and White House jobs to ease her through that difficult time.”

On March 25, 2008, when Nancy Reagan stepped outside her Bel Air residence to endorse McCain who held her arm, her words were less than enthusiastic: “Ronnie and I always waited until everything was decided, and then we endorsed. Well, obviously this is the nominee of the party.” She said nothing else during the five-minute meeting with the press.

Time makes people forget. John Edwards, you may again one day run for president.
 
ABOUT THE WRITER
Carol Jensen is a long-time Barstow resident, graduating from Kennedy High School and Barstow College, where she was an English instructor for many years. Much of her time now is spent writing political and social commentary. She may be contacted at cajensen49@msn.com.